Chapter 8: Ossiam’s Finest Hour

As Caelendra had died on the eve of the spring equinox, her funeral rites were carried out the next morning in place of the day’s usual festivities. After the last of the odes and elegies were spoken, her body—wrapped in silk, blanketed with the first flowers of the year, and resting on a gilded litter—was lifted up by four of the younger priests. Followed by a procession of sobbing mourners, they carried her up the path that clung to the side of the western cliffs and then down again into the depths of the sacred catacombs, where she joined the remains of the other women who, like her, had been vessels for the Goddess.

Had her successor been named, the new chief priestess and Goddess incarnate would have led the way out of labyrinth and back into the daylight.

Instead, their oracle did.

It was Ossiam’s finest hour.

Under Caelendra’s cautious, circumspect leadership, the oracle’s role had been entirely ceremonial. While she had consulted Ossiam on every expected occasion, nodding solemnly as he spoke and praising the skill of his prophesying, when it came to action she’d done whatever she thought best—never failing to give him full credit for his guidance even when her decision was the exact opposite of what he had actually said, as it often was.

Now he held the shrine’s future in his hands.

The whole of the valley’s population was gathered and waiting in the same grove where they’d celebrated the summer solstice nine months earlier when the procession returned from the catacombs. Now, as before, the crowd split apart and drew back, opening a corridor, this time to let Ossiam, leading the line of droning priests and priestesses, pass through.

Leaving the others behind him at the foot of the great altar stone, Ossiam swept up the steps to stand above them all.

The sun was directly overhead. The sky was a vast empty sea of blue—without a wisp of a cloud or a single bird in flight to offer any hint of what was to come.

“Bring me the sacrifice!” Ossiam’s cry rang out in the stillness like the sound of ice splitting in a frozen lake.

Clearly, the goat—which had to be dragged, bleating and kicking, up the altar steps—foresaw nothing good in its own future. It took three strong men, pitting all their strength against its panicked struggles, to wrestle it into submission and lift it into place. As two of them gripped its flailing legs and one forced its head back to expose its throat, it gave a shrill cry that sounded almost human.

Ossiam stepped forward, raised the sacred dagger high over his head with both hands, and then brought it down.

The silence was so sudden and so complete that it seemed for a moment the audience had stopped breathing when the goat did. It was so quiet that those standing closest to the altar could hear the sound of the oracle’s ceremonial blade slicing open the goat’s belly. Barehanded, Ossiam scooped up its still-pulsing bowels and held them above his head as the assistant priests pulled its flaccid corpse out of the way.

Instead of the usual incantation, he simply cried out, “Tell us your will!” as he sent the entrails spilling across the stone slab. Then he stood staring into the quivering coils until it seemed that not even the pillars around them could bear the suspense any longer.

“Feywn!”

Looking up, Ossiam stretched out his right hand, still dripping with the goat’s blood, to point at a golden-haired girl standing among the half dozen priestesses-in-training.

“It is she and none other whom the spirit of the Goddess chooses! It is she and none other who is now our chief priestess and the vessel in whom the Goddess dwells!”

His pronouncement was met with a palpable shift in the crowd’s silence, from awed to bewildered.

Herrwn, like all the rest, looked from Ossiam to Feywn to Rhonnon and back to Ossiam, in what an outside onlooker might have thought was an amusing imitation of a herd of deer turning their heads in unison toward an unexpected sound in the underbrush and then to their lead stag to see which way he would dart.

Most of the priests and priestesses were expecting to hear Rhonnon’s name pronounced. After all, why would the Goddess pass over her closest kinswoman to pick a girl just sixteen years old and still in training? Though no one spoke it out loud, a question hovered in the air: What if Ossiam mistook the message in the entrails—his vision affected by Feywn’s youthful beauty or by Rhonnon’s well-known aversion to taking advice from men?

Perhaps Ossiam was aware that he’d lost his audience and perhaps he wasn’t, but suddenly he staggered backward, as if struck by a spear in his chest. Drawing in a rattling gasp of air, he lurched forward again. Then his body went rigid. His back arched. His eyes rolled upward, leaving only their whites exposed. When he spoke again, his voice was high-pitched and shrill and seemed to come from a long way off as it howled, “Feywn! Feywn! It is Feywn whom the Goddess chooses!”

Then, just as abruptly, his stance relaxed, his eyes rolled back down, and his voice returned to normal—or, at least, to the normal of an oracle in the midst of his declarations—as he added, “And now she will come forth, and she will choose a consort, and he will reign at her side in a union that will change our destiny so that the power, the glory, and the riches of the past may once again be ours.”

While Ossiam may have been right about the spirit of the Goddess entering Feywn (and after two long reigns spent within priestesses known for their reliability and diligence rather than their sexual allure, it did seem at least possible that She might choose Feywn over Rhonnon), Herrwn was absolutely certain the oracle had misread the identity of the consort that Feywn would choose to “reign at her side.” He’d been watching his cousin closely and knew him well enough to read his expression even from a distance—and he saw the eagerness glow in his face as Feywn walked toward him—and saw it fade when she passed by him to place her hand on the arm of his disciple, Rhedwyn.

It seemed to Herrwn a youthful blunder, an affront to all the older and higher-ranking priests and especially to Ossiam, to whom she owed her amazing elevation in rank and authority, but whether Feywn’s choice was inspired by girlish desire or by divine wisdom, it was an act that resonated.

Beginning as a whisper somewhere in the back of the crowd, the notion that the spirit of the Goddess had leapt from Caelendra’s dying body into Feywn out of a deathless passion for the priest She’d chosen to take the part of the Sun-God nine months earlier gathered strength and spread through the gathered throng with the force of a powerful wind sweeping away their doubts and misgivings. As if on cue, Rhedwyn took the silk shawl embroidered with the symbols of the Goddess out of the hands of the priestess who’d been standing next to Rhonnon and draped it around Feywn’s shoulders. In that moment, without any outward change beyond an almost imperceptible stiffening of her posture, Feywn assumed the mantle of absolute authority as their chief priestess and the living embodiment of the Great Mother Goddess.

“And you cannot argue that Ossiam was entirely wrong for, beyond any question, Feywn’s union with Rhedwyn did change our destiny.”

Startled to realize that he’d spoken out loud, Herrwn shifted his position on the edge of the cliff to relieve the numbness in his right leg and finished his thought silently—that while Feywn’s union with Rhedwyn might now be seen to have brought tragedy instead of triumph, surely Ossiam would be able to explain the discrepancy if he were still with them.

Ossiam himself never admitted to either disappointment or resentment over Feywn’s choosing his apprentice over himself. In fact, when Olyrrwd gibed him about it later, Ossiam affected studied indifference as he replied, “Who did you think I meant?”